DustBowl's journal

[dustBowl]

Adventures in Electric Piano Disassembly
I was sitting at my piano last weekend watching some lessons when I sloshed coffee onto the keys. Whoops. I cleaned the surface as well as possible, but I could see that some of the coffee had made it down below the keys. I was tempted to leave it alone because everything seemed to be working fine and I wasn't sure whether there was anything sensitive for the liquid to reach, but I decided I should at least attempt to disassemble and clean it correctly.

I didn't know where to start, so I did a little googling. It took me a few searches to find a video that showed how to take everything apart. The correct search term turned out to be "Yamaha P125 replace keys" (Yamaha P125 is the model of electric piano I have)

The first step was to unscrew 60 (!!) screws in the bottom side of the piano body. That allowed me to separate the upper part of the body, which houses the keys, from the lower portion, which houses some electronics and the speakers. I was surprised to see that there's not really that much in that lower part of the body. Two speakers, a couple of boards, and some wires.



From there, I needed to fully separate the top and bottom of the body. That was as simple as removing an adhesive strip and unplugging four wires (cables? not sure about the correct terminology)



That freed me up to start working on the keys themselves. Four screws held in each octave. Once those were out, I could lift out each octave as one piece to reveal... some kind of electronics beneath them. Which wasn't a super exciting discovery, since that's where I just had just spilled my coffee.



Lo and behold... once I had everything opened up, I could see that coffee was in fact sitting on whatever those electronics are. I don't know a lot about this kind of stuff, but I feel pretty confident that it's not good for sugary liquid to be sitting there. Not a lot of volume, but probably still less than ideal. So I dabbed up as much of the coffee as I could and then followed up with isopropyl alcohol.



From there, it was just a matter of reassembling everything in the opposite order. The piano seems to be working fine, though it's only been a week. To be honest, I'm not even sure whether this whole process accomplished anything, but it did make me a little bit less afraid of taking apart electronics that I own for fear of hurting them. Baby steps.

[ertyu]

I relate to this. Often, especially with more common consumer electronics like laptops, major brand cell phones, etc., someone had made a yoututbe tutorial and there are schematics available. Oftentimes, too, to execute a repair you don't need much beyond average intelligence. The limiting factor is psychological and exercises like these definitely help.

[rref]

Did you remove the silicone rubber (if possible) and clean below it? Otherwise the liquid can potentially short or isolate the PCB contacts leading to hearing a tone constantly or one or more keys not responding.

[dustBowl]

@ertyu
I was actually partially inspired by your post about whether you should attempt to fix your macbook. I haven't posted about it here, but I've also been attempting to do some DIY macbook repairs recently, and and so have been going down a rabbit hole of electronics disassembly / repair. After watching a bunch of videos showing how to re-solder damaged motherboards, opening up a piano body to do some cleaning doesn't seem so bad. Which is to say, I agree with your point - at the intro DIY level, barriers to entry are mostly psychological, more than anything having to with skills or gear.

@rref
I didn't remove the silicone - I wasn't sure if it was supposed to come off, so I was hesitant to mess with it. But based on your comment, I opened everything back up to take another look. The silicone piece in question actually came up quite easily, and it looks like I got lucky - the amount of coffee residue under there was really minimal. I went ahead and did another round of cleaning with isopropyl alcohol, just to be safe. After reassembling, it still seems to be working fine.

[rref]

Looks good!

The black parts on the silicone creates a connection between the "combs" on the PCB when pressed down, so the important part is that there is no connection between the combs before pressing the button and that the black part is not isolated from the combs by a layer of non-conductive dried up sirup.

[dustBowl]

Converting a thinkpad into a dev workstation

Until recently, my daily-driver laptop was a 2019 macbook pro. I liked it because I use that same model for my work, so I've internalized all of the hotkeys and touch gestures. And because despite all their lame anti-consumer practices, nobody else touches Apple when it comes to UI/UX.

But alas, some liquid leaked onto it in my backpack a few months back, and it pretty much gave up the ghost right away. After a few weeks of attempted DIY diagnosis, I took it to a repair shop I trust. Their verdict: The logic board was corroded beyond their ability to repair, which means that the only viable solution was a full board replacement. Logic boards for that model cost about $1100, so factoring in labor, I was looking at something like $1500 to resurrect it.

So, I was highly motivated to find an alternate solution. That solution came i the form of Lenovo thinkpad I had sitting in my closet from before I got the macbook. The hardware was fine for what I wanted it to support, which was just some small programming projects plus the usual web browsing. But I had two problems:

1. It ran windows, and I hate programming on windows. Solution: partition hard drive, install Linux, dual boot
2. It only had a 256gb SSD. Fine for one operating system, but getting a little tight if I was going to partition the drive in half. Solution: buy a larger drive and install.

The steps I took...

...to upgrade the drive:

1. Buy a 1TB SSD, external drive (for saving a windows system image of my machine's state prior to new drive install), thumb drive (for creating installation media = what you use to boot your machine once you've installed a new drive, since it doesn't have an OS on it). Total cost ~= $200
2. Use built-in windows utility to save a system image of machine's current state onto external hardrive
3. Use a utility you download from one Microsoft's websites to turn your USB drive into something you can boot a windows install off of
4. Install new SSD. This step was incredibly easy and took less than 10 minutes. Remove laptop battery, remove six screws in laptop bottom case, unplug one cable, remove some housing, swap in new SSD. Yay for Lenovo and thinkPads, especially since I was recently digging around in my now-deceased macbook and it was a big pain
5. Turn on laptop with new drive, enter bios, select USB as boot media
6. Recover system image saved onto external drive in step 2
7. Finit. You're in the same state that you were in prior to this whole process, except with a bigger hard drive

...to install Linux:

1. Spend some time researching distros. I don't want to do anything fancy, so ubuntu it is
2. Follow the instructions on the ubuntu site to download an ubuntu image onto my usb stick previously used for creating a windows boot drive
3. Use windows drive utility to split my new drive into two partitions
4. Restart my laptop, boot to bios, select usb drive as boot media
5. Mindlessly click through the ubuntu boot menu (except for the step you have to choose the newly-created partition as your ubuntu install location)
6. Ubuntu is now installed and pretty much works out of the box
7. Spend a bunch more time setting up software-development specific tools

On the whole, the process was pretty painless, and much cheaper than repairing my previous laptop would have been.

I do miss the macBook, though... I can already tell that there are going to be a lot of small annoyances that come with using Linux compared to macOS. For now, I'm going to persist. My assumption is that I should be able to improve the experience if I'm willing to invest enough time into configuring everything. Or maybe if I wait long enough reverse hedonic adaptation will kick in.

We'll see. I'll report back once I have a few months worth of data.

[dustBowl]

Catching up
It's been about six months since my last post. Quite a bit has changed since then.

I quit my job (again) in November. I wish I could tell you I had all kinds of smart ERE-type reasons for leaving, but really I was just experiencing such high levels of work stress that the rest of my life was starting to severely suffer. And as much as I tried, I couldn't compartmentalize effectively.

The precipitating event was a period last October during which I was so stressed that I basically didn't sleep for three straight weeks. Not exactly zero sleep - maybe three nights of sleep total over a three week period. For most of that time, it felt like someone had flipped a switch in my brain and permanently disabled my ability to sleep. By the end of those three weeks, I was in pretty rough shape, as you might imagine. To call it debilitating would be an understatement. I thought I was going to have to go to the hospital and get sedated or something because no amount of drugs, meditation, therapy, etc., would allow me to sleep.

I took some time off of work and was eventually able to get the insomnia somewhat under control, but that period was really the death knell for this round of working. I hung on for another month or two, but I was checked out mentally.

Finances
Financially, taking some time off should be okay. Not ideal from a pure dollar standpoint, but acceptable given the trade-offs. My net worth was around $275k when I quit, with around $100k of that in cash or post-tax assets that are easy to liquidate. My monthly burn rate is 3k-4k, most of which goes to paying to live alone in a 1BR in Seattle.

Assuming I don't go back to work, finances dictate that I'll need to leave Seattle when my lease is up at the end of July. Or at least find some kind of different, cheaper living situation. I'm not particularly attached to Seattle, though, so I'm leaning toward leaving for a cheaper part of the country.

I need to tell my landlord whether I intended to stay for another year by the end of May, so that creates a natural timeline for my decision-making process.

Current areas of focus
To be honest, I haven't been thinking about financial stuff at all. My mental energy since leaving work has been devoted pretty much exclusively to the following subjects:

1. Learning how to sleep well and on a regular schedule
2. Improving my cooking skills and eating healthy
3. Working out regularly
4. Developing a consistent physical therapy routine for chronic knee and back pain
5. Getting back on the wagon with my Content purge / digital minimalism stuff (I fell off on this goal while struggling at work)

I'm happy to report that at this point, I'm consistently sleeping 10 hours / night, from roughly 10PM to 8AM, and waking up without an alarm. I've been implementing some of the protocols described in the Huberman Labs podcast after seeing it referenced a few times here on the forum. The key ones for me have been getting sunlight exposure at certain times of day and developing a yoga nidra practice.

But really, I was able to sleep fine again as soon as I left work. Literally, the first day I was done with work I slept for maybe 16 hours. So I'm not sure how much to attribute to the Huberman protocols. My sense is that they're helping me with consistency and maybe quality of sleep, rather than addressing the actual core insomnia issue. That one I fixed (at least temporarily) by quitting my job.

Still, my hope is that by developing and internalizing healthy routines now, during a low-stress time, I can establish a healthier baseline to fall back on when I inevitably cycle back into a higher-stress period of life.

Emotional work, self-reflection
At this point, it's pretty clear to me that I've been doing variations of the same cycle since I started working in my early 20s. Where the cycle looks like get job -> experience levels of stress that range from 'debilitating' to 'life-ruining' -> quit job -> get new job, convince self that new job will be better -> continue cycle

Previous iterations of the cycle could be disguised as the usual 'software developer job hops to move up the ladder', because I moved to a 'better' company or role as part of each cycle. But the loops have been getting shorter and the negative effects more severe each time, to the point that it's not viable to just continue the pattern any more.

So I guess it's time to make a change. What that means, and what self-work will be required, is somewhat murky. I've done quite a bit of therapy in the last decade, and for now, it feels like I've exhausted that approach. So that leaves something more... self-directed? Possible next step will be delving into Plotkin, since that's been helpful to some other forum denizens...

Questions I've been thinking about:

• Why do I apparently experience higher levels of stress or an inability to cope in environments in which (some) other people function fine?
• What narratives have I internalized, consciously or not, about work? How do those narratives intertwine with other narratives about self, worth, social standing, value, etc.?
• Maybe it's a simple square peg round hole thing and I should try something radically different? I've basically only had variations of one job, though I think being a modern software developer is pretty cushy compared to a lot of jobs.
• If we're trying to improve our lives, whatever that means, how should we prioritize changing ourselves vs changing our environment?
• To what degree is it even possible to change the self? Can we rewrite our own auto-narratives?
• Is all of this stuff just me over-intellectualizing the fact that I hated being a corporate software developer?
• Is all of this stuff just me over-intellectualizing so I don't have to make concrete changes in my life that are hard or scary?
• What could those hard or scary changes be?

To steal a phrase form @AxelHeyst, this is schwerpunkt. I don't see much point in getting another job until I've done this work, because I'll probably just end up repeating the same cycle detailed above and end up back in the same place so why bother?

Plans for this journal
Going forward, I'll aim to update this journal at least once a month. The MMG I'm a part of has set a goal of doing monthly updates, and I figure I should post them here in the interest of not darknetting the main forum. Posting on a regular cadence is also one of the tips that Jacob gives in his guidelines on how to create a useful journal.

[AxelHeyst]

Good lord, that sounds awful dustbowl, I'm sorry to hear about that.

Sounds like you might be thinking about a long term sabbatical type deal? Adult gap year? You might like some of these podcasts which I came across recently, on the topic of sabbaticals:
https://boundless.substack.com/p/the-ca ... ticals-144
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t ... 0597272580
Needs to be filtered through ERE lens of course, but might be some ideas in there. They might also be not appropriately meaty enough for where you're at.

Also... just throwing it out there. Some folks round here would consider >$200k enough to not w*rk again. Which poses an interesting counterpoint to just how inevitable a return to the higher stress lifestyle is for you.

You pulled together a quarter million dollars via a high-stress and highly remunerated skillset. Unless there's something about your situation I don't know about (totally possible: if so, my bad), you could just be done. You could just take the next 3-5 years to get your CoL down, heal, explore those questions you wrote down, try different things, and potentially build a new life for yourself. The 'real world' you return to after a path of seeking your own truths could be, like, running a surf shack in Baja 12 hours a week, or whatever your unique version of that is.

I'm really looking forward to hearing how this phase of your journey goes, the ups and the downs. These circumstances are what ERE praxis is for.

[ertyu]

@DustBowl, shoutout to you, dude--this has been exactly my experience. I have a bit less money than you do, but what you are describing in terms of trying to escape this cycle by changing jobs and telling yourself that surely it's just this job and the next one would be better, then eventually the burnout cycles shortening and the job-hopping starting to be more and more of a red flag to future employers + you asking yourself, "what's wrong with me? why does everyone else seem to do it and i can't?"

I too gather myself together and become saner when i'm not working full time. Then I get another job, and I go back into the deep end, being miserable and neurotic. Sharing this mainly to let you know you're not alone and to give you a hi-five. Sometimes, it do be like that. Good luck

[dustBowl]

@Axel
Thanks for the podcast and substack recommendations. I'll read / listen to them and write my thoughts down here.

Your post got me thinking: one of the things I appreciate about ERE is that, for me, it provides a framework for transmuting negative experiences or thought patterns into more useful ones.

In this case, that might look like reframing 'my job was killing me and I couldn't hack it, so I had to quit' into 'I can take a sabbatical, get healthy, and then explore what kind of lifestyles might exist that are a better fit for my personality'.

Other similar transmutations that seem to reoccur in ERE-space:

• Obsession with freedom-from (suffering of some kind) becomes finding freedom-to
• Not having enough money becomes living a good life while consuming fewer resources
• ???

I doubt that this is the way Jacob thought about it when he was creating ERE. 'The power of positive thinking' seems like a very un-Jacob concept, lol. But I mean, none of the FIRE OGs were miserable wage slaves either, unlike the hordes (me included) that followed in their wake... which is to say, I guess, that we have to adapt the original ERE ideas to our specific situations as best we can, regardless of the original intent.

@ertyu
I'm actually glad you commented, because your journal is one of the ones I relate to the most strongly. I just didn't feel like I had anything useful to add, so I didn't say anything.

But now I'm thinking I should have, because reading your post made me feel better about my situation. So maybe the inverse would have happened if I had told you that we were going through the same things. There's a lot to be said for solidarity in suffering

[AxelHeyst]

... which is to say, I guess, that we have to adapt the original ERE ideas to our specific situations as best we can, regardless of the original intent.

Boom. And, the original intent was to be

...a "how-to" manual for "how-to" manuals. The intention is for each person to create his own strategy.

[dustBowl]

@Axel
Right on. MMG2 is re-reading The Book right now, and that quote provides a great lens through which to view the ERE source material as we review it. It also leads nicely into a related subject that came up in our last MMG discussion, which is...

Following lists vs thinking about principles

Relevant quote from the book:

To live as a free person, following lists of easy, repetitive things, possibly in return for some reward, is exactly what should be avoided. Instead, it's necessary to understand how the world works and how people have been specialized to the point of general incompetence, like ants, which only know how to do one job, but do it very well; this is not human nature. To live well, one must go beyond lists and start thinking creatively about solving problems. One must accept a lot more personal responsibility than merely showing up on time, following orders, checking off boxes, and trying to fit in. One must learn the general systemic rules that allow one to improvise and really live life the way it was intended - in your own way, rather than following checklists devised by some random guy, like me.

I brought the above up in our last MMG roundtable because in some ways, I feel like I've more or less just replaced my previous list of consumer behaviors with a list of ERE behaviors.

An example: I got rid of my car a few years ago, after reading about the benefits on MMM and later the ERE blog. Having spent a few years in ERE-world now, I can articulate to you the ways in which not having a car fits into my web of goals (physical fitness / reduction of environmental footprint / frugality). And yet, on some level, it still feels like I read Jacob's 21-day makeover on the blog, and he said to get rid of your car, so hey, I got rid of my car.

So the question I posed to the group was: how do we develop the mindset described in the paragraph above? And one of the answers given, which I think was really smart, was to consume diverse sources of information and attempt to integrate them. Even if the different information sources are themselves just lists, it's unlikely that they'll all be perfectly aligned. More likely, they'll contradict each other in some way, or provide different perspectives. And so in your attempts to integrate them into something coherent, you'll be forced to think at a higher level about the ideas they contain. In other words, you'll be forced to think about shared principles instead of just following any one list.

(I think what I'm saying here is probably covered by the copy/compare/compile/etc. framework that I've seen Jacob describe, but I don't remember exactly how that works. I'll need to see if that comes up later in the book or search for it on the forum)

Speaking of consuming diverse sources of information, we find the following shortly after the previously quoted paragraph:

I have been inspired by many different sources: books on backpacking, observations of animals and ecosystems, boating, cycling, people living in cars--even the homeless. I have read books on systems theory, biology, physics, finances, as well as more practical manuals on plumbing, house wiring, construction, etc. and then I have adapted these ideas to my own life.

With the above in mind, I think a useful exercise actually would be to go through and read the sources given the ERE bibliography. Obviously that would take a while since the references section of the book lists 72 entries. And it might seem a little silly given that Jacob already did the hard work of reading them all and pulling out the common threads for to read in the form of the ERE book.

But if we're talking about exercises targeted at developing principle-oriented thinking, then just reading the book isn't going to give the same benefits as diving into diverse sources of information and working that integrate-disparate-ideas brain muscle.

...

All that said, I'm not going to go through the ERE bibliography right now, because development in other realms is a higher priority at the moment. But if a time comes when 'develop principle-oriented thinking' is a top priority, then I think de/reconstructing ERE would be an interesting project.

[AxelHeyst]

So the question I posed to the group was: how do we develop the mindset described in the paragraph above? And one of the answers given, which I think was really smart, was to consume diverse sources of information and attempt to integrate them. Even if the different information sources are themselves just lists, it's unlikely that they'll all be perfectly aligned. More likely, they'll contradict each other in some way, or provide different perspectives. And so in your attempts to integrate them into something coherent, you'll be forced to think at a higher level about the ideas they contain. In other words, you'll be forced to think about shared principles instead of just following any one list.

I think that's very smart too. It's easy enough to just read A and think "hm sounds good okay I think A now." It's another to then read B, and think "well that makes sense. Wait. It somewhat contradicts A, which also makes sense. Ah, hell, I have to think for myself now..."

I'd add: and also, as part of that process, pursue diverse experiences and attempt to learn from them. Bias towards action (where consequences and opportunity costs are low). As Jacob is exploring in the thread about freedom-to based on temperament, different people are going to vibe in some ways and not others. A strategy that's good for dustBowl might be terrible for Axel - and giving it a well-planned go might be the only way to know.

I'm also thinking of 'experiments' like buy nothing year. There are insights to be had, levels of thinking to be attained, only via the experience of the thing. You'll begin BNY because it's on someone's list, but in 12 months the experience will have informed how you view problem-solving, money, wants/needs, gratification, and the relationships between all of those things in ways that no amount of reading and thinking could.

But - balance that with the wisdom that it's best to learn from other people's experiences, if you can swing it.

Add: wrt principle-oriented decision making, a suggestion. Write down ten, or five, or fifteen, principles to live by. No pressure, you don't have to live by these principles the rest of your life. Just come up with some, even if as soon as you write them down they seem inadequate. Put them somewhere you'll see them every day. Try to live by them. Notice when it works and when it doesn't. Cross off/modify/amend/add whenever you like. Do this for the rest of your life. By the time you are old, your list of principles ought to be pretty bomber, I bet.

[ertyu]

I'd like to put in 2 cents for the standard navel-gazey/therapeutic approach to this, as well. Obviously, the way to get the confidence to think independently about solving problems is to practice solving problems: enter "write down your principles and use them to make decisions," "conduct experiments," and the like, all of which are useful.

Also useful: look, if your implicit assumption about life is that it's not for you to set the course, make self-directed, independent decisions, or be the "center of agency" in any other way, you learned it somewhere. So, who taught it to you? Was it school, or parents, or failure? Or, conversely, was it success and receiving positive feedback when you were rewarded for relinquishing your own agency? In other words, how did you become not-the-person-in-that-paragraph?

The purpose here isn't to blame or to avoid personal responsibility. Rather, the purpose is to understand the ways in which this isn't a natural but a conditioned state. The purpose is to understand what's in it for you, both in terms of psychological payoff you get from being not-like-that, and in terms of feared things/outcomes you avoid by not being like that.

In other words, imagine you were indeed the person in that paragraph and be in tune with your body. Im almost positive you'll feel a tension, a resistance to being that person; a subtle or not so subtle aversion to being that person -- a "that way lie dragons" feel.

So what dragons are those, then? Don't try to argue with the dragons or undo them or reshape them, just get to know them. Just knowing oneself is so valuable -- because now you'll hit that decision-making or those life experiments or whatever action steps you decided to do, and you'll do them from a different place. You'll notice that same tightening and go, "ah, there that is" instead of tightening against it or struggling against it or trying to avoid it or whatnot.

When you navel-gaze, actually let yourself feel both the positive emotions associated with not being paragraph person, and the negative emotions. So, do let yourself experience, in your body, that "heh, the relief from the fear of getting it wrong and fucking it all up sure feels nice, huh? very peaceful" feel -- or whatever feel might arise for you, idk. Could be scary, too; this one time i allowed myself the idea of letting go of the j*b and there was an almost physical sensation of being picked up by a cold, dark, high-powered ocean wave and being forcefully slammed into the rocks ahead. Was that a premonition or an anxiety daydream? Who knows, felt very powerful tho. I'll be finishing a job contract in another four months. Being someone whose CV looks like his ass, in a sea of negging recruiters who'd like to get me to doubt myself so i can accept lower pay, I get to do the "ah, there you are" thing with fear quite a lot. I don't know how this all will turn out, but going into it from a place of, "ah, there you are," beats struggling, trying to force myself, and blind anxiety and panic literally any day of the week. The tl;dr is, I guess, that this forum is full of people who will tell you to DO. I am here to throw in 2c for, don't forget to keep the balance between inner and outer work.

[Crusader]

How much of this stress that you felt at your job was induced by you vs. was objectively a part of your job. For years, I noticed that I would stress about stuff way more than anyone else. I would take arguments personally etc. Once I started treating it like some kind of a game, my job satisfaction improved tremendously. I started by volunteering to interview people so that I could prepare myself for interviews, instead of fixing bugs and that seemed to have rewarded me. I now try not to understand but just treat work as some kind of a social experiment or learning experience.

[Lemur]

I ended up concluding with my last job that no amount of intellectualizing was going to solve my problem. Leaving was the final solution. And like magic, all my supposed mental issues went away when I took on a new job somewhere else.

I also concluded like what @crusader has stated, on reflection, much of the problems was in my own head. It is worth it to explore what is causing these issues and build mental tools to deal with them. It is quite possible though that one has to leave their environment to be able to get this reflection. Lessons are more easily learned in hindsight. I think you will learn much from your break!

Also some self compassion - Humans aren't meant to be chained to a desk 9-5 everyday anyway. Of course this causes existential problems. You're not unique in this situation.

[avalok]

Once I started treating it like some kind of a game, my job satisfaction improved tremendously.

I ended up doing something similar when I grew dissatisfied with a job and how things were done there; the seemingly never-ending state of chaos. I left but returned after just six weeks when I realised how toxic the culture I had moved to was. I didn't do it consciously, but on returning the whole thing became a game of sorts, and the same place I hated became the team I enjoyed working in, without the culture changing much. That's not to say one shouldn't care, or be unprincipled, but turning a situation on its head can do an awful lot.

@dustBowl OOI what model ThinkPad did you resurrect last September? I think they are the pinnacle of maintainability, portability and economy in computers. Always great to hear of one being given another lease of life with an SSD and Linux.

[dustBowl]

I'd add: and also, as part of that process, pursue diverse experiences and attempt to learn from them. Bias towards action (where consequences and opportunity costs are low).

A good reminder for me, because I have a bad tendency to over-analyze stuff as an avoidance mechanism.

The 'where consequences and opportunity costs are low' part is a useful framing device, because it reminds me that I actually have a lot of flexibility. Really the only consequences I want to avoid are 1) spending too much money and 2) rendering myself unemployable. That leaves a large range of viable options.

On the other hand, 'pursue diverse experiences' can probably be implemented on a more micro level than what I'm envisioning and still be valuable. There's a lot of space between 'go live in a tent in the desert or whatever' and 'do exactly the same thing you've been doing for the last decade.' Aiming too big can make it hard to get started. Instead, start smaller and build momentum? I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud...

Add: wrt principle-oriented decision making, a suggestion. Write down ten, or five, or fifteen, principles to live by...

Good suggestion. I'll give this a try.

[dustBowl]

@ertyu

See, this is great, because you offer a different perspective from @Axel's, so now I have to try to integrate them

It's like you read my mind, though, because the next post I wanted to write was about agency.

I was doing my ERE re-read when I came across the following passage in The Book:

"Humans with an internal locus of control--the belief that they're in control and that they're the masters of their own destiny--posses agency. Agency resists and reduces stress.... Combined with self-confidence, agency is the attitude that any problem can be fixed, given enough resources in the form of time, effort, and determination. The attitude rests either on a thorough knowledge of training in what is to be done, or on the surety that such knowledge or training can be attained. This attitude is often transferable from one field to another, completely different field. Doing something that is considered very difficult at least once in your life is highly recommended." (emphasis mine)

So, as you predicted, the textbook ERE answer to the question 'how do you develop a sense of agency?' is 'Do something!' More specifically do, something difficult, as a way of proving to yourself that you have agency.

But, like you, I also see value in doing inner-reflection-type work.

...

I don't have a great response to the meat of your post, other than: I think you're right on target. It inspired a lot of thoughts and feelings, but they're going to require significantly more processing before they're in a sharable state.

...

The tl;dr is, I guess, that this forum is full of people who will tell you to DO. I am here to throw in 2c for, don't forget to keep the balance between inner and outer work.

Exactly. Reflection allows you to point yourself in the right direction so you're not just stumbling around in the dark, throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. But at some point, you have to turn reflection into action if you want to make a positive change. The optimal balance is probably going to depend on where a person naturally falls on the [prone to acting without thinking <--> prone to thinking without acting] scale.

[dustBowl]

How much of this stress that you felt at your job was induced by you vs. was objectively a part of your job.

I also concluded like what @crusader has stated, on reflection, much of the problems was in my own head. It is worth it to explore what is causing these issues and build mental tools to deal with them.

Unfortunately, I think the honest answer to @Crusader's question is that nearly all of it was self-induced. With the evidence being that I've had different jobs matching each of the following descriptions:

• Low pay, low expectations, chill boss
• High pay, high expectations, bad boss
• High pay, high expectations, great boss

And in all cases, the outcome was the same, as described previously. So, I'm pretty sure the key issues at play are internal, not external.

Once I started treating it like some kind of a game, my job satisfaction improved tremendously.

I didn't do it consciously, but on returning the whole thing became a game of sorts, and the same place I hated became the team I enjoyed working in, without the culture changing much.

Interesting to see the re-occurrence of the gamification idea. Clearly there's something to it. The thing is, I (kind of) already took a similar approach. I never believed my job had any meaning; I always held it at a distance. If you had asked me what I thought about my job, I would have told you something like "It's pretty silly that I get paid this much to create meaningless widgets, and none of this really matters at all, but I get paid well so I'll go along with it for now, I guess."

The problem is, right after telling you that (and believing it!) I would go lay in bed all night unable to sleep because of work stress. Or do whatever other kind of destructive stress-induced behaviors.

So there was some kind of mismatch between my intellectual conscious reality and my emotional reality.

And I think that's where the work that @ertyu mentioned comes in. Figuring out where those points of misalignment are between what I think I believe and what I apparently actually believe or feel. And then figuring out how to build the mental tools that are correctly tailored to whatever you discover, like @Lemur said.